


Your Life Has Not Been Trademarked (Some People Have Real Problems)

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Mad Men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-17
Updated: 2007-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:11:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1626062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are who you pretend to be, so you better make sure that's someone you can live with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Life Has Not Been Trademarked (Some People Have Real Problems)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to K for helping me out and to SK for beta duty. Mad love.
> 
> Written for nm973

 

 

Every morning Donald Draper wakes up at 7:15 a.m. He has a shower, a shave, and gets dressed for work. On Mondays and Wednesdays he wears his navy suit; on Tuesdays and Thursdays he wears one of his black suits; on Friday he wears his grey pinstripe suit.

At 7:35 a.m Don's wife, Betty, has breakfast waiting for him: two eggs - scrambled, four pieces of bacon - extra crispy, one glass of orange juice and two cups of coffee. His children watch him flip through _The New York Times_ from over their bowls of Cornflakes and his wife hovers by with the coffee pot in hand. Husband, wife, son, daughter - Don's breakfast is like an advertisement in _Good Housekeeping_. The perfect family by Coca-Cola. By 7:55 a.m, Don is on his way to the train station to go to work in the city.

This is Donald Draper's life. It's not a bad life.

*

Donald Draper is the Everyman of 1960. He is a doting father, a loving husband, and a loyal employee. He votes Republican, pays his taxes on time and makes sure to buy American. He smokes his Lucky Strikes and goes to church on Sundays.

Donald Draper is an envied man. His wife is beautiful; he's a partner in a multi-million dollar advertising firm. He's healthy and full of life and has not one, but _two_ mistresses - or he did until he let one of them run off with her beatnik boyfriend.

Don could have kept Midge; he didn't, but he could have. Donald Draper can have anything; he can be anyone. Don _is_ anyone -- probably because Don doesn't really exist. He's a shell, an overcoat. Don is whomever he makes himself out to be: it's not as easy as it sounds, but you are who you pretend to be, so you better make sure that's someone you can live with.

*

At 9:02 a.m Don arrives at the offices of Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, and by 9:13, he's striding down the hall to his office. Past Campbell's office - the little shit - and Cosgrove - the artiste - and right up to Peggy's chunky little face. Peggy Olsen was a cute kid when she started, but she's completely let herself go. That doesn't make her any less efficient as Don't secretary; in fact, it probably makes her better, because the guys have stopped hitting on her. By 9:20 in the morning the minions are clamoring for Don's attention, and his day is off and running.

This is the life of Donald Draper, for what it's worth, which is forty-five thousand dollars a year, plus a partnership.

*

Don used to dream about his mother. Actually, wait, that's not true. _Dick Whitman_ used to dream about his mother. Dick, the orphaned son of a prostitute who died giving birth to the child that no one wanted anyway, used to close his eyes and pretend that the clapboard house and the abusive step-mom was all a dream. Dick dreamed that his mother wasn't dead and that he wasn't being brought up in a broken down home where no one loved him and no one cared if he lived or died.

 _Dick_ used to dream that it was all a dream, except it wasn't. And then Dick went to war and died, and Don was born. Well, Don Draper already existed, but when he died in a sinkhole during the war, Dick took over his dog tags and the reigns. He gave Don Draper a better life than he ever would've had on his own - of that Dick is pretty damn sure.

*

Around 11:30 in the morning, Don will get a phone call from one of his clients. Actually to call Rachel Menken one of his clients does her a disservice. It implies a level of detachment that hasn't really existed between Don and Rachel since they started having sex.

Rachel is the first Jew that Donald Draper's slept with - another misnomer since no sleeping tends to occur - but not the first Jewess for Dick Whitman. Dick is dead, however, and Don is alive and very in love with Rachel, in his own way.

Maybe if Don't mother hadn't died this would all be different. Maybe if Don had known real love from the beginning, he wouldn't keep looking for it with every woman he meets, but wishes don't pay the bills, so wanting will have to do. Right now, what Donald Draper wants is a real woman. Someone to be strong with him and for him. He already has someone to cook and clean and sew for him. He has the Madonna; he needs a whore, or a least someone in touch with their sexuality, and this is what separates Rachel from Betty in Don's eyes. Betty is the girl he fell in love with, but even though she's the mother of his two children, she's still just a girl; her analyst agrees. Rachel, though, she's exotic and forbidden and a _woman_ , and of all Don's mistresses - and there have been more than a few - she's his favorite.

Of course, before Rachel, Midge was Don's favorite.

*

It probably should have been harder for Dick to become Don or for Don to become Don, but it wasn't. It was almost as though _Dick_ was the facade, a temporary hiding place until the day that Don was born. Or reborn. After Don got discharged and moved to Manhattan, he met Betty. Beautiful, uncomplicated, from the right sort of background, Betty, with her creamy skin and demure ways. Betty, who was a model, and not an easy one at that. She was the sort of wife that Donald Draper should have: loyal and pretty and made in the perfect advertiser mold. A girl like Betty never would look twice at a guy like Dick Whitman, but Donald Draper, the young ad ex at Sterling Cooper, well, she would look twice at him. Don could live with that.

*

The problem with having mistresses is the maintenance. It's not the sex or the money or the neediness, it's having enough hours in the day to keep them happy. It's keeping your wife happy and your kids happy and keeping the other women, who keep you with your wife and your children, happy too.

Rachel isn't terribly high-maintenance: she just wants what she wants when she wants it. Don can relate to that. He can relate to discreet lunches away from the office and walks in the park and the way she always smells of talcum powder and red lipstick. Don can relate to the way that Rachel never asks for anything but his time, and when they cross paths with Salvatore Romano in a part of town that none of them have any business being in, they all pretend that none of this is happening.

It's worked for Don this far.

*

Some people have real problems: death, cancer, irritating wives, a lack of cigarettes, a strange itch that won't go away. Some people have problems that they create for themselves: too many mistresses, annoying, ladder-climbing underlings that should be fired, heart-attacks in the workplace because they're fucking too many bimbos. And then there are problems that don't quite fit under nice headings: problems like wives who seem permanently stuck at eighteen or problems like the days when it's much easier to walk out of your child's birthday party than it is to play happy families for one minute more because _you just don't feel like it_.

A lot of times Don doesn't feel like doing a lot of things. It's a lot harder to be Donald Draper than it looks, but most people don't understand that.

*

At night, Donald Draper goes back to his perfect wife and his perfect children. He eats his perfectly made dinner and then has a perfectly rolled Lucky Strike and three fingers of whiskey.

His wife puts the children to bed while Don watches the evening news, and between the advertisements for Nixon and Kennedy, Don thinks about the life he's made for himself. Don thinks about his perfect job, perfect family and perfect mistress.

It seems as though everyone Don knows thinks he's someone else; it's like he's inhabiting someone else's life.

And then he remembers that he is.

-end-

 


End file.
